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Will hears the tire go before he feels it - a sharp pop like a gunshot through the trees. He flinches with his whole body, in an instant conjuring militaries and heavy guns and running for his life under a haze of bullets. The whole car lurches towards the tire that blew, and he pulls onto the shoulder of the road, cursing. For a second, everything is still. Then adrenaline sends his hands shaking, something inside not having caught up to the fact he’s safe.
It’s a flat tire. Just a flat. Does he even remember what to do with a flat tire? What if he doesn’t have a spare? He isn’t even sure if he has a jack, or the iron to take the tire off – it isn’t like he’s ever checked. Was he supposed to have checked? Shaking his head, he forces himself to move. Cold air cuts through him as he opens the door and steps out. The smell of rain hits him next, and a quick glance at the sky, gray and heavy, tells him he doesn’t have long before it starts. He’d really been hoping to get home before the storm on the horizon rolled in and the sun went down, but that’s out the window now.
He’d gotten Jonathan’s old car, on the condition he would help his brother fix it up to run again. Doing that had taken six months and more trips to the hardware store than he wanted to count, but one morning in late April Will turned the key and the sound of the engine turning over thrummed through him.
“Consider this a late birthday gift.” Jonathan said as they sat at the kitchen counter with a pitcher of lemonade between them, sliding the keys over towards him.
“Really? Are you sure?” Will had asked, catching them.
“I’ve got a new job and Mom will be getting a new car of her own soon, and you and I can share, anyway. But you. . .deserve the freedom.”
Okay – what was it Jonathan told him? Get the jack first. He moves to the trunk after grabbing his coat, fingers clumsy on the latch. Digging through a blanket, an out-of-date atlas, and nearly upturning a box of god only knew what, he lifts the bottom of the trunk bed. Inside grooved Styrofoam is a small donut of a tire, atop which sits a jack, and beside that, the tire iron.
Picking up the jack, he exhales decisively. “I can do this,” he mutters, even though he doesn’t quite believe it. Crouching down to look under the car, he tries to remember where to put the jack, cursing himself for not paying more attention to what he’d been shown.
Jonathan taught him to drive before he was even allowed. California, in empty parking lots baked in sunlight and rippling with heat. Long stretches of road where no one cared if a fourteen-year-old was behind the wheel. Will remembered gripping the steering wheel too tight at first.
“Relax,” Jonathan had said easily, like it wasn’t terrifying. “The car’s not gonna bite you.”
“It might, you never know.” Will retorted, half-joking. Jonathan laughed at that, really laughed in that way that made everything feel a little lighter.
“Well, then I guess we’ll bite it back.”
Will laughed then, too. It was simple and solid the way he loved his brother.
As he begins to lift the jack after lining it up under the frame, a drizzle starts to patter gently on the back of his neck. Slowly, the car lifts and a minute later, so does the tire. When he stands back to make sure it’s far enough off the ground, he mentally pats himself on the back. That hadn’t been so hard. Maybe it wouldn’t be so difficult after all. Reaching for the tire iron, he fits it to a bolt and turns. Nothing happens. He tries again, straining with all his might – and the tire turns, but the bolt is still locked tight.
Ten minutes later Will is still wrestling with the tire iron to get the flat off the car in the first place, cursing his fragile fingers as they slip yet again off the wet metal. Of course he’d be too weak to loosen a lug nut from its tire. After all, he’d been shown so time and time again. If only he’d been taught this properly instead of the lesson being broken up across years and through different people. Panting, he wrenches at the metal again, but it slips in his grasp. The rain is picking up, making it harder to hold than it already is. Surely there’s trick for it, but all he can feel is a despairing frustration at himself and how weak he is.
Lonnie tried to teach him things, too. Only they weren’t things a little kid needed to know.
After Will told him he didn’t want to play soccer, or throw around a football, he took him to the shooting range instead. Before Will knew it, he was riding shotgun with the long barrel of a gun across his lap, Lonnie smoking a cigarette with the window half-open. He was only half-listening as Lonnie talked about teaching him something useful, if he was too much of a wuss to play soccer.
By the time they stood downrange, gun weighing him down and Dad at his back, he nearly dropped it with a stab of panic that this was used to kill things. Soccer would have been better than this – especially when Dad helped him aim before telling him to imagine the target as an animal. That he was shooting something alive to make it dead. Protecting himself, supposedly. He flexed his fingers around the handle and trigger guard, intermittent sounds of bones snapping in half ringing in his ears.
The gun felt wrong in his hands, too big, too loud, even before it fired. After it fired, the shot making it leap in his hands and nearly throw him off his feet, he heard Lonnie laughing.
“Next time, don’t close your eyes when you pull the trigger.” Lonnie patted him on the back, seeming to not see the way Will shook and how his eyes welled with tears. Lonnie said it would teach him to protect himself. Will only knew that his ears rang for hours after the lesson, and when Jonathan came home from having gone hunting with Lonnie a week later, his brother didn’t stop crying for days. He only learned years later that Jonathan had been forced to kill a rabbit.
Wiping his hands on his jeans and standing up again, he braces one foot against the tire and leans his weight into the tire iron. The metal groans, then the nut gives a sharp crack and loosens. He almost laughs in relief, planting both feet on the ground again to finish unscrewing it. One down. Four to go. He fits the tire iron into the second nut, only just remembering to do the one across from the one he’d just unscrewed. Something about keeping the tire balanced.
He settles into the rhythm of unscrewing the nuts, hands still slipping on cold metal, mind drifting to all the ways he’s been taught to be a man, both good and bad. Lonnie, Jonathan, Hopper—his role models, for better or worse. At least Jonathan is patient with him, seemingly endlessly so. Hopper is gruff, but he cares. Lonnie… Lonnie is everything Will doesn’t want to be, despite a strange grief pulling at him, knowing the man who was supposed to be his father will never get a chance to redeem himself now.
It’s been nearly a year since he died, Will realizes with a start. None of them even bother going to the funeral, especially not when Lonnie’s girlfriend tells Mom he died wrapping his car around a tree coming home from a bar one night. It’s been nearly a year since Will has even thought about him, but now it hits him harder than ever, shivering on the side of an empty road, struggling to do something that should be easy—if he’d ever actually had a dad who cared.
Lonnie haunts the back corners of Will’s mind the way Vecna does, though now he drags himself into the light, slipping in and out of memories as he works.
The first time Lonnie ever made him feel unsafe, Will didn’t have the words for it. He just remembered the quiet. Not the good kind, before a story starts; the heavy kind that filled the house like a storm waiting to break.
After five beers, Lonnie got quiet. After seven, the silence cracked. Yelling would fill the house, threats aimed at Mom, at the state of the house, at Will and Jonathan.
After ten, he learned to stay in his room with Jonathan, sitting shoulder to shoulder, music turned up just loud enough to muffle the shouting down the hall. Will didn’t always understand what was being said, but he understood tone and the way his chest tightened at certain sounds. Jonathan would just nudge his shoulder and ask him to pick their next album, as if that were enough to keep out the danger that permeated the house.
The ground is slick now, mud clinging to his shoes the same way the rain plasters his hair to his forehead and soaks through his jacket. He shifts his weight to loosen the final lug nut, and his half-numb hands slip again. “Come on, you piece of shit—” He growls at it as if talking to the ruined tire will do him any good. And though frustration bubbles up, hot and sharp, he tries again. It’s stupid; it’s just a tire. This shouldn’t be difficult. Yet the thought creeps in anyway, unwelcome but familiar: he’s not strong enough. He’s too soft, too easy to break. Never mind he’d taken down no less than three Demos with his mind.
Will learned to stop showing Lonnie his drawings after a while. At first he’d been proud to show them, saying ‘look what I made’ and ‘look who I am’. But where Mom would smile broadly and tell him how much she liked it, Lonnie would laugh, or worse, take the page right out from under him and mock it.
He’d written the name Will W. at the bottom of the page with relish. He’d spent the last thirty minutes working on a drawing on himself and Mike in one of their brand-new costumes they’d put together with the help of Mom after finishing their first game of dungeons and dragons.
“What’s this?” The page was ripped out from under his crayon a second later, Lonnie frowning at it. “Spelled your last name wrong, boy.”
“No I didn’t!” He protested, trying in vain to grab it back from him. He jerked it up and out of reach with a flick of his wrist, still inspecting the page.
“We’re the Byers, Will. Not the Wyers.” He sneered, tossing it roughly back down on the table. “And why’d you write ‘Mike B.’ under the one with the shield?”
“I. . .” Will hesitated. Something didn’t feel right about telling him the truth – one that had seemed so simple yesterday. Mike had said it like it was nothing, like it was part of the game same as the dice and the dragon. “What if we swapped last names? Just for the week.” He’d grinned when he said it. “You be me, I’ll be you.” When Will had looked at him, confused, he’d gone on to explain how fun it would be to be someone else for a while, and Will’s the best person he knows so how great would it be to see what having his last name feels like. And so they’d agreed, for the week, only around each other, they were Will Wheeler and Mike Byers.
Out loud scrambled for something safe to share, “It’s the game Mike and I were playing yesterday. We picked characters to be and went on a quest. I’m the wizard, and wizards are wise. Mike is the knight, because he’s the brave one.” Mike would be proud of him for coming up with that on the spot.
“Is that right?” Lonnie asked, a skeptic rise to one of his brows. Will didn’t know how to read his next expression, something a little darker, something suspicious in a way that tightened his chest. Did he know he was lying? He opened his mouth to say something else, anything else, but then Lonnie spoke again, “Next time, pretend to be someone who can spell his own damn name right.”
The last lug nut comes loose and he sets it carefully aside with the others. Rain drums heavily on the car and on him, adding another layer of percussion to his already hammering heart. When he reaches to finally pull the shredded tire from the threads, it sticks, because of course it does. Bracing himself again, knees soaked now from kneeling in the mud, he pulls harder and it finally slips free. The tire falls against him, nearly knocking him flat with its weight. He pushes it to the side with a grunt, breathing labored. Right, now for the spare.
Nodding to himself, he stands, intending on turning toward the trunk. Instead, he’s stuck in place once more, soaked, muddy, alone on the side of the road. The thought hits him once again – Lonnie was supposed to be his father. But he never really was, not in the ways that counted. Especially not after he left to forge a new family, or to drink himself silly, or just to leave the burden of them behind. Despite himself, Will misses what he never had. Or maybe he’s just missing the idea of him, the space where something should have been. The space Jonathan never should have had to fill yet did so without complaint. Where Lonnie taught control like a force – something to be dominated by being louder, stronger. By being the first to push back, then ensuring it never happened again – Jonathan taught control like it was balance. Control what you can and let the rest go.
Will came home crying once after school, no older than six, having been called names and laughed at until he felt smaller than a bug under a shoe. Lonnie didn’t even listen to his explanation, he just told him to hit back.
“Don’t come home whining again,” he’d said, guiding Will’s stance slowly and deliberately. “You want them to stop? You make them stop.”
Then he faced Will, hands curled into fists before him, some kind of gleam in his eye. Then, a quick strike to his shoulder, “accidental”, he’d called it, though it had knocked him flat on his back.
The pain was sharp, but not as sharp as the shock of it and the way the world tilted, suddenly unsafe in a way it hadn’t been before. Will only cried harder, confused, until Jonathan stepped in – always Jonathan. He pulled Will to his feet with gentle hands, just the opposite of Lonnie’s.
Later, in his room, Jonathan sat across from him and told him that wasn’t the only way.
“But you fight,” Will had said, voice still small and on the edge of tears.
His brother hesitated, “Yeah. . .he taught me the same way. He knocked me down too. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to be like him, or me. You don’t have to stop being you to win. There’s something special about being you, Will.”
He drags the spare tie over. It’s lighter than the flat tire, but not enough to make it any easier to lift. He tries to lift it with his hands, still slick from mud and rainwater, before sitting back on his heels and taking a second to think. Tears of frustration burn in his eyes that he refuses to let fall. He blinks at the sky, wondering what he’s forgetting from when Hopper had walked him through a similar scenario last year.
They’d been working on Hopper’s truck at the time. It was late spring and the days were finally beginning to warm again, though the gray sky remained to hide the sun from truly drying out the wet earth. They were outside the house that had become home, Hopper’s cabin now renovated into a home for four – at least until Jonathan went to college.
“Jonathan showed you some of this stuff already, right?” Hopper asked, crouched beside him next to the wheel of the truck, tire on the ground waiting for a patch and a refill of air before being replaced.
Will shrugged, saying with a chuckle, “Kinda. I mostly handed him tools while he cussed at the car.”
“Then do it,” he said, stern but not unkind. “You don’t learn by watching.”
He hesitated. “What if I mess it up?”
“Then you fix it. And I’ll be here to help if you need.” He said with a shrug, as if it were simple as that. No yelling, or ridicule, just permission to try again.
“Just try again.” Will mutters. “Right. Easy.” He wipes the worst of the mud from his palms, ignores the tears now mixing with the rain dripping down his chin, and shifts to sit with his legs bracketing the tire, feet all the way under the car. Maybe if he lifts it with his knees and not just his hands, he’ll have a chance at getting it on.
His first attempt fails, as does his second and third. The rain is coming down too fast for him to get a decent grip on anything. Then, he props the tire up on his legs and bends them, using his hands to balance it. Finally, it lines up and slides into place. He lets go with a gasp, arms trembling from the strain even as some of the tightness in his chest eases.
Slowly, he puts the lug nuts back on one by one, tightening each with a deliberate movement. He feels steadier now, inexplicably. The doubt in himself doesn’t vanish, but it does quiet a little, pushed away by the proof in front of him that despite the father that failed him and the disjointed lessons, he could still succeed. All his life he’s been told what he isn’t. Not tough enough, not strong enough. Too sensitive, too soft, too different, like those things cancel everything else out. Like they make him lesser than.
But standing here, hands dirty and soaked to the bone, staring at something he fixed with his own hands. . .he doesn’t feel weak. He might not be the kind of strong that Lonnie understood, or Vecna, but he’s the kind of strong that saves his friends from danger not with force, but belief. Belief in himself.
There are a few good memories of Lonnie, not that he likes admitting that. Somehow it feels like a betrayal of all the good Mom put in, all the ways Jonathan helped, even a betrayal of himself, considering the man hated who Will was before he even knew who he would become. Like acknowledging anything good excuses everything else he did.
Still, they exist. Small fragments of time – a laugh that wasn’t mean, a day that didn’t end in shouting, a hand to his shoulder in comfort. They float nebulously in his head, struggling to fit in with the rest of the narrative. But grief is a strange thing, Will thinks, as he lowers the car back to the ground and begins to pack away the tools into the trunk. It doesn’t arrive cleanly, nor in a way that’s even understandable. It tangles all the good and the bad, the joy and the sadness and anger and laughter until it’s just a mass of emotions sitting heavy in his chest.
Lonnie is gone. That’s good – he’s been out of their lives for most of his life at this point anyway. Yet still Will is angry for what he never got, inexplicably missing him. For the father he might have had, if things had been just a little different. For the way he never taught him to change a goddamned tire, because he couldn’t be bothered to stick around long enough.
Well, fuck Lonnie Byers. Whatever knowledge he’d wanted to pass on wasn’t worth learning anyway, and Will had more than enough people to teach him the important things: Hopper’s perseverance, Jonathan’s loyalty, Mom’s fierce devotion. Those were worth remembering.
He slams the trunk shut once more and presses his hands flat to the cold metal, allowing it to ground him. He takes a slow breath before circling back to the driver’s seat. Looking at the road ahead, the rain blurs the distance into something unclear but passable. He fixes his hands to the wheel at ten and two and pulls from the shoulder onto the asphalt, slow but sure of himself.